Poems 1959-2009 (6 page)

For anything. I'm lolling here in Mayfair under bluish

Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.

Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.

One cannot be the way one was back then today.

It went away.

I go from Claridge's to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back

To Claridge's, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.

The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.

The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

Outside the windows is New York.

I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

They're watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that's missing.

 

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,

And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.

The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter

Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.

One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer—what a show!—

Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.

London once seemed the epitome of no regrets

And the old excellence one used to know

Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.

We follow blindly, clad in coats of pink,

A beast whose nature is to run and stink.

I am civilized in my pink but

Civilized is about having stuff.

The red coats are called “pinks.” Too much is almost enough.

No one knows why they are. I parade in the air

With my stuff and watch the disappearing scut

Of a deer. I am civilized but

Civilized life is actually about too much.

I parade in the air

And wait for the New Year

That then will, then will disappear.

I am trying not to care.

I am not able not to.

A short erect tail

Winks across the winter field.

All will be revealed.

I am in a winter field.

They really are everywhere.

They crawl around in one's intimate hair.

They spread disease and despair.

They rape and pillage

In the middle of Sag Harbor Village.

They ferry Lyme disease.

The hunters' guns bring them to their knees.

In Paris I used to call the Sri Lankan servants “Shrees.”

I am not able not to.

Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,

Venery is written all

Over me like a rash,

Hair and the gash,

But also the Lehrer
NewsHour
and a wood fire and Bach.

A short erect tail

Winks across the killing field.

All will be revealed.

I am in a killing field.

I remember the
chasse à courre
in the forest in the Cher.

I remember the English thoroughbreds ridden by the frogs.

I remember the weeping stag cornered by the dogs.

The stag at bay in the pond literally shed a tear.

A hunt servant in a tricorn hat waded out to cut its throat.

Nelson Aldrich on his horse vomited watching this.

The huntsman's heraldic horn sounded the
hallali
.

The tune that cuts off the head.
L'hallali!

Back to the château to drink the blood.
L'hallali!

I am in Paris being introduced at Billy's,

1960, avenue Paul-Valéry.

One of her beautiful imported English Lillys or Millys

Is walking around on her knees.

It is rather like that line of Paul Valéry's.

Now get down on all fours, please.

We are ministers of state and then there is me chez Billy.

Deer garter-belt across our field of vision

And stand there waiting for our decision.

Our only decision was how to cook the venison.

I am civilized but

I see the silence

And write the words for the thought balloon.

When the woods are the color of a macaroon,

Deer, death is near.

I write about its looks in my books.

I write disappearing scut.

I write rut.

The title is
Kill Poetry
,

And in the book poetry kills.

In the poem the stag at bay weeps, literally.

Kill poetry is the
hallali
on avenue Paul-Valéry.

Get rid of poetry. Kill poetry.

Label on a vial of pills. Warning: Kill kill kill kills.

Its title is
Kill Poem
,

From the
Book of Kills
.

The antlered heads are mounted weeping all around the walls.

John F. Kennedy is mounted weeping on the wall.

His weeping brother Robert weeps nearby.

Martin Luther King, at bay in Memphis, exhausted, starts to cry.

His antlered head is mounted weeping on the wall.

Too much is almost enough, for crying out loud!

Bobby Kennedy announces to a nighttime crowd

That King has died, and then quotes Aeschylus, and then is killed.

Kill kill kill kills, appalls,

The American trophies covered in tears that deck the American halls.

 

And when the doctor told me that I could have died.

And when I climbed up from the subway to the day outside.

White summer clouds were boiling in the trees.

I felt like falling to my knees.

Stand clear of the closing doors, please! Stand clear of the closing doors, please!

And when the camel knelt to let me mount it.

Winged angels knelt in silhouette

To worship at the altar made of blue

That the sun was fastened to.

It all came down to you. It all comes down to you.

In New York City “kneeling” buses kneel for the disabled.

My camel kneels. We fly into the desert.

I flee in terror to my tranquilizer the Sahara.

I stroll slowly down sweet Broadway.

It is as you say. We are here to pray.

 

I often go to bed with a book

And immediately turn out the light.

I wake in the morning and brush and dress and go to the desk and write.

I always put my arm in the right sleeve before I slip into the left.

I always put on my left shoe first and then I put on the right.

I happen right now

To be walking the dogs in the dangerous park at night,

Which is dangerous, which I do not like,

But I am delighted, my dog walk is a delight.

I am right-handed but mostly I am not thinking.

(CHORUS)

A man can go to sleep one night and never wake up that he knows of.

A man can walk down a Baghdad street and never walk another drop.

A man can be at his publisher's and drop dead on the way to the men's room.

A poet can develop frontotemporal dementia.

A flavorful man can, and then he is not.

The call girls who came to our separate rooms were actually lovely.

Weren't they shocked that their customers were so illegally young?

Mine gently asked me what I wanted to do. Sin is Behovely.

Just then the phone rang—

Her friend checking if she was safe with the young Rambo, Rimbaud.

I am pursuing you, life, to the ends of the earth across a Sahara of tablecloth.

I look around the restaurant for breath.

I stuff my ears to sail past the siren song of the rocks.

The violin of your eyes

Is listening gently.

 

A rapist's kisses tear the leaves off.

Aiuto!

The world looks so white on the white pillow.

I think I know you. I don't think so.

Winter is wearing summer but it wants to undress for you, Fred.

Oh my God. Takes off the lovely summer frock

And lies down on the bed naked

Freezing white, so we can make death.

Joel and I were having lunch at Fred's,

The restaurant on the ninth floor of Barneys

Where Joel likes to eat when he is in New York,

Who had just landed, and when I ask him what astonishment

He is carrying around with him this time,

He takes out of his jacket pocket

A beige
pochette
,

And out pops a stupefying diamond ring I know from Paris.

It opens its big eye.

It went nonstop to Florida in his pocket on the plane.

Now returns with a stop in Manhattan to the JAR safe, place Vendôme.

I have to try it on.

It is incredible what travels

Unprotected in that pocket through the time zones.

I look down at my finger

And field-trip an alternate universe.

Don't I know you? I don't think so. It is not for sale.

Diane von Furstenberg in those sweet bygone days

Got it in her head I had to meet her friend

The jeweler to the stars.

Two hummingbirds hummed across the pont des Arts,

And through the cour du Louvre, to Joel's JAR.

At her old apartment at 12, rue de Seine,

We lived like hummingbirds on nectar and oxygen.

 

Shirts wear themselves out being worn.

Suits fit perfectly,

But a man does

Decades of push-ups and no longer fits.

I take myself out to dinner.

It is a joy to sit alone

Without a book.

I use myself up being fine while I dine.

I am a result of the concierge at the Carlyle.

I order a bottle of Bordeaux.

I am a boulevard of elegance

In my well-known restaurants.

The moon comes over to my table.

Everything about her is typical.

I like the way she speaks to me.

Everything about me is bespoke.

You are not

Known, and you are not no one.

I remember you from before.

Sometimes I don't go out till the end of the day.

I simply forget till

I rush out, afraid the day will end.

Every sidewalk tree is desperate

For someone.

The desert at this time of year

Is troops in desert camouflage.

Bring in the unmanned drones.

I dine with my Carlyle smile.

She tells me spring will come.

The moon stops by my table

To tell me.

I will cut your heart out

And drink the rubies and eat the coral.

I like the female for its coral.

I go to Carnegie Hall

To make her open her mouth onstage and scream.

 

I once loved,

I thought I would be loved,

But I wasn't loved.

I wasn't loved for the only reason that matters—

It was not to be.

I unbuttoned my white gloves and stripped each off.

I set aside my gold-knobbed cane.

I picked up this pen …

And thought how many other men

Had smelled the rose in the bud vase

And lifted a fountain pen,

And lifted a mountain …

And put the shotgun in their mouth,

And noticed that their hunting dog was pointing.

 

What could be more pleasant than talking about people dying,

And doctors really trying,

On a winter afternoon

At the Carlyle Hotel, in our cocoon?

We also will be dying one day soon.

Dr. Holly Andersen has a vodka cosmopolitan,

And has another, and becomes positively Neapolitan,

The moon warbling a song about the sun,

Sitting on a sofa at the Carlyle,

Staying stylishly alive for a while.

Her spirited loveliness

Does cause some distress.

She makes my urbanity undress.

I present symptoms that express

An underlying happiness in the face of the beautiful emptiness.

She lost a very sick patient she especially cared about.

The man died on the table. It wasn't a matter of feeling any guilt or doubt.

Something about a doctor who can cure, or anyway try,

But can also cry,

Is some sort of ultimate lullaby, and lie.

 

I spend most of my time not dying.

That's what living is for.

I climb on a motorcycle.

I climb on a cloud and rain.

I climb on a woman I love.

I repeat my themes.

Here I am in Bologna again.

Here I go again.

Here I go again, getting happier and happier.

I climb on a log

Torpedoing toward the falls.

Basically, it sticks out of me.

At the factory,

The racer being made for me

Is not ready, but is getting deadly.

I am here to see it being born.

It is snowing in Milan, the TV says.

They close one airport, then both.

The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.

He buzzes me through three layers of security

To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department

Where I will breathe my last.

Trains are delayed.

The Florence sky is falling snow.

Tonight Bologna is fog.